Quicksand by Nella Larsen

I doubt that Quicksand is often associated with naturalism. And yet, I found many of the hallmarks of naturalism in it. The protagonist, Helga Crane, is looking for happiness. And that happiness is, from the start, problematized by race. She's unhappy in the U.S. because she naturally gravitates to a class of black intellectuals. And while she enjoys their company, she can't handle the rigid, Booker T. Washington style of education of Naxos, where she briefly teaches. In NYC, she seems to have found a preferable mode of being, but all the intellectuals there are obsessed with "the race problem," and particularly obsessed with the horrors of miscegenation. As the child of a white mother and black man, Helga is frequently the brunt of unwitting insults.

In true naturalist fashion, Helga tries to escape her problems through a change in environment, and moves to Denmark to live with her mother's rich relatives. Here she begins what can only be considered a life of decadence: going to nice parties, wearing expensive clothes, and being painted and courted by Axel Olsen, a man who is both rich and an artist. But being exoticized in Denmark, and having no other black people around, eventually grows old, and Helga decides that she needs to have a partitioned life, splitting time between Europe and America. "This knowledge, this certainty of the division of her life into two parts in two lands, into physical freedom in Europe and spiritual freedom in America, was unfortunate, inconvenient, expensive."

But even this solution doesn't hold up; Helga's friend Anne has married her old superior at Naxos, Dr. James Anderson, who Helga holds an unbreakable yearning for. They kiss once, she imagines a future between them, but he makes it clear that the kiss was a mistake. Helga decides abruptly to marry a rural Southern preacher, and thrusts herself into the world that most subjects of naturalism work to escape; Quicksand is thus a version of reverse naturalism, in which the intellectual, who could live a rich life in Denmark or an intellectual one in Harlem, voluntarily descends into a life of hard work and poverty. At first she dislikes the life, but eventually accepts it by accepting faith in God: "Her religion was to her a kind of protective covering, shielding her from the cruel light of an unbearable reality" (117). But the horror of her third childbirth destroys this faith: "Because, she knew now, He wasn't there. Didn't exist. into that yawning gap of unspeakable brutality had gone, too, her belief in the miracle and wonder of life" (120). And in keeping with this naturalistic view of life, her infant perishes in less than a week, lacking the "vitality" to survive (121). But the novel ends with Helga still trapped in her miserable environment; although she's discovered that the Negroes are trapped by their belief in the "white man's God," she doesn't quite have the physical strength to leave the town yet (123). And the novel ends: "And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child" (125).

To return to my original point: I wouldn't necessarily think of this as a naturalistic novel. And yet, it's depiction of a world without meaning, of people trapped in an unalterable environment, and it's obsession with the importance of race (something that Helga both discounts and accepts) it seems similar in many ways to naturalism. Which leads me to the question: is the question of race simultaneous a question of naturalism? Or, to put it in another way, could an African American novelist write a book in the first part of the 20th century that didn't share many of the concerns of naturalism? I think this is possibly an essay question; it's also something to think about in the highly naturalist work of Richard Wright (and his move from the naturalistic despair of Native Son to the mild optimism of Black Boy) and in the racial theories of Alain Locke.